y regarded her with the open-eyed adoration of a heathen Goth
receiving the Gospel from Saint Ursula.

"By Jove!" he murmured. "You're wonderful."

"Let us stretch our legs, Hilary," said Adrian, who had not displayed
enthusiastic interest in the housing of Liosha.

So we went off, leaving the two together, and we discoursed on the
mystic ways of women, omitting all reference, as men do, to the
exceptional paragon of femininity who reigned in our respective hearts.
Perhaps we did a foolish thing in thus abandoning saint and hungry
convert to their sympathetic intercourse. The saint could hold her own;
she had vowed herself to Adrian, and she belonged to the type for whom
vows are irrefragable; but poor old Jaffery had made no vows, save of
loyalty to his friends; which vows, provided they are kept, are
perfectly consistent with a man's falling hopelessly, despairingly in
love with his friend's affianced bride. And, as far as Barbara and
myself have been able to make out, it was during this intimate talk that
Jaffery fell in love with Doria. Of course, what the French call _le
coup de foudre_, the thunderbolt of love had smitten him when he had
first beheld Doria alighting from the motor-car. But he did not realise
the stupefying effect of this bang on the heart till he had thus sat at
her little feet and drunk in her godlike wisdom.

The fairy tales are very true. The rumbustious ogre has a hitherto
undescribed, but quite imaginable, gap-toothed, beetle-browed ogress of
a wife. Why he married her has never been told. Why the mortal male whom
we meet for the first time at a dinner party has married the amazing
mortal female sitting somewhere on the other side of the table is an
insoluble mystery, and if we can't tell even why men mate, what can we
expect to know about ogres? At all events, as far as the humdrum of
matrimony is concerned, the fairy tales are truer than real life. The
ogre marries his ogress. It is like to like. But when it comes to
love--and if love were proclaimed and universally recognised as humdrum,
there would never be a tale, fairy or otherwise, ever told again in the
world worth the hearing--we have quite a different condition of affairs.
Did you ever hear of an ogre sighing himself to a shadow for love of a
gap-toothed ogress? No. He goes out into the fairy world, and, sending
his ogress-wife to Jericho, becomes desperately enamoured of the elfin
princess. There he is, great, ruddy, hairy wretc